Many Congressional Republicans were shocked—SHOCKED!—this week at Donald Trump’s humiliation in Helsinki. Like the rest of the world, they watched in real time as an American president kowtowed on foreign soil to a dangerous adversary of the United States. Siding with Russian President Vladimir Putin over the repeated conclusions of the unified American intelligence community and the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, Trump once again rejected the idea of Moscow’s ongoing interference in U.S. elections that began in 2016. “Make no mistake about it,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell warned, “I would say to our friends in Europe, we understand the Russian threat and I think that is the widespread view here in the United States Senate among members of both parties.”
But that’s not all McConnell said after Trump shamed himself and his nation on the global stage:
"We may take up legislation related to this. In the meantime, I think the Russians need to know there's a lot of us who fully understand what happened in 2016, and it really better not happen again in 2018.” [Emphasis added.]
Mitch McConnell should know. After all, he was one of the Gang of 8 Congressional leaders briefed by the Obama White House in August 2016 on the strategy and scope of the Kremlin’s cyber-aggression designed to tilt the presidential election to the Republican Donald Trump. But McConnell chose partisan advantage over patriotism, warning Obama of hell to pay from the right if the president went public about the Russian attacks.
Of course, it was hardly the first time that right-wing rage—or even just the threat of it—led American policymakers and law enforcement officials to backtrack, change course, or just remain silent. After all, in 2016 former FBI Director James Comey went public with the Bureau’s investigations of Hillary Clinton while withholding information about the growing Trump-Russia scandal, precisely because of the withering conservative hell storm he would face if did anything else. And as a quick glance back shows, from the fate of the Bush torture team and raising the debt ceiling to the battle over Obamacare and even the 2000 Florida recount, the focused fury and organized outrage of the ranting right led press and politicians alike to edit their options and alter history.
To be sure, Mitch McConnell didn’t hesitate to extort the Obama administration even as the United States was under cyber attack from Russia in the summer of 2016. Obama’s team went to Capitol Hill to deliver a classified briefing to the leaders of both parties from each house of Congress and their respective intelligence and foreign affairs committees. As the Washington Post reported in June 2017:
The meeting devolved into a partisan squabble.
“The Dems were, ‘Hey, we have to tell the public,’ ” recalled one participant. But Republicans resisted, arguing that to warn the public that the election was under attack would further Russia’s aim of sapping confidence in the system.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) went further, officials said, voicing skepticism that the underlying intelligence truly supported the White House’s claims. Through a spokeswoman, McConnell declined to comment, citing the secrecy of that meeting. [Emphasis added.]
But the Post account understates McConnell’s skullduggery. As Vice President Joe Biden explained in January, “This was all about the political play.” (In his book, former Obama national security aide Ben Rhodes described McConnell’s gambit as “staggeringly partisan and unpatriotic.”) As Ryan Lizza summed it up in the PBS Frontline documentary “Putin’s Revenge,” McConnell’s posture was even more grotesque than that:
JEH JOHNSON, Sec. of Homeland Security, 2013-17:
They were all there— the speaker, leader Pelosi, leader McConnell, leader Reid, the Foreign Affairs Committees, the Intel Committees. They were all there. And we briefed them on what we knew.
NARRATOR:
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell expressed skepticism about the intelligence and warned that he would not join an effort to publicly challenge Putin.
RYAN LIZZA:
They’re told by Mitch McConnell, the majority leader of the Senate, that, “If you do that, we’re going to interpret that as you putting the thumb on the scales for Hillary Clinton.” [Emphasis added.]
McConnell didn’t merely refuse to sign on to a bipartisan statement of condemnation of Russian interference with the American election. The watered-down letter he eventually put out on September 28, 2016 with Minority Leader Harry Reid, House Speaker Paul Ryan, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi didn’t even mention Russia and urged states to reject federal assistance in securing their voting systems:
The Department of Homeland Security stands ready to provide cybersecurity assistance to those states that choose to request it. Such assistance does not entail federal regulation or binding federal directives of any kind, and we would oppose any effort by the federal government to exercise any degree of control over the states administration of elections by designating these systems as critical infrastructure,
As Obama chief of staff Denis McDonough lamented last year, “We viewed the Russian efforts as a serious national security threat unrelated to the outcome of this particular election, and we firmly believed that Russia should be punished irrespective of who won.” But Mitch McConnell was only concerned about Donald Trump winning, and did his best to make sure that happened.
As did, in a sense, James Comey. As he made clear both in congressional testimony and in his book, Comey in July 2016 took the rare step of making a public statement about someone the FBI had decided not to charge. Why did he do that in the case of Hillary Clinton’s emails, a case he insisted “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring? It wasn’t really an effort to “persuade a majority of fair and open-minded Americans” that the investigation had been done in an honest and nonpolitical manner. But that, as NPR’s Steve Inskeep in April and later the DOJ’s own Inspector General pointed out, wasn’t Comey’s job:
INSKEEP Here's the thing that's on my mind, director. You were hoping to demonstrate that the FBI was above political influence. Did you, in your course of action actually allow yourself to be politically influenced? Because you write first that you were concerned about criticism — essentially conspiracy theorizing — about the FBI, from Republicans that President Obama's candidate for president would be cut a break. Later on you talk about this meeting between the Attorney General Loretta Lynch and former President Clinton. And you say you had no thought that there was any conspiracy there, but after it became a big thing on cable TV, it changed your mind. Were you actually being influenced by cable TV pundits in what you decided to do?
COMEY: Yeah, that's a reasonable question, Steve. I don't think so, and here's why I say that: Even if cable TV punditry had never been born and there were no such thing, there would be intense public interest in a criminal investigation of one of the two candidates for president of the United States.
Inskeep’s question is even more salient when it comes to Comey’s decision to ignore DOJ and FBI guidelines in releasing the October 28 letter that virtually ensured Hillary Clinton lost the election. As Matthew Yglesias lamented following publication of Comey’s book this spring, “The overwhelming conventional wisdom that Hillary Clinton was going to win on Election Day played a role in his fateful decision to refocus the campaign on the email matter in late October”:
“It is entirely possible,” Comey writes, “that because I was making decisions in an environment where Hillary Clinton was sure to be the next president, my concern about making her an illegitimate president by concealing the restarted investigation bore greater weight than it would have if the election appeared closer or if Donald Trump were ahead in all polls. But I don’t know.”
As Heather Digby Parton recently wrote, the Inspector General’s report on Comey’s handling of the Clinton email case and subsequent Election Eve announcement about reopening the investigation after emails were discovered on Anthony Weiner’s laptop simply proved “the FBI is terrified about Republicans.”
Instead of referring to and being guided by longstanding Department and FBI policies and precedent, Comey conducted an ad hoc comparison of the risks and outcomes associated with each option. He described the potential consequences “concealing” the existence of the emails as “catastrophic” to the FBI and the Department, because it would subject the FBI and the Department to allegations that they had acted for political reasons to protect Hillary Clinton. Instead, Comey said he chose the option that he assessed as being just “really bad.”
But Comey had his hand forced on that “really bad” option in large part because of what some deemed “Trumpland” in the New York FBI office. FBI agents in New York were cracking jokes about seeing Hillary Clinton in handcuffs, one DOJ official recalled, which reflected a “there was a faction in that office that couldn’t stand her and was out to get her.” Sure enough, Rudy Giuliani appeared on Fox News on October 26 boasting, “We got a couple things up our sleeve that should turn this around. Even the liberal pollsters will get to see.” It’s no wonder Comey worried:
“I thought there was a pretty reasonable likelihood that it would leak.”
But those kinds of considerations—whether confidential FBI information might leak and how it might be received by different audiences—were precisely the ones for which IG Horowitz later reprimanded Comey.
But if conservatives had successfully “worked the refs” to lead James Comey to open up about the damaging details of his Hillary Clinton probes, the same voices ensured he kept word of the Trump-Russia investigation silent. As Comey put it in an October 16, 2016 email about the FBI probe into Russia and the Trump campaign:
I think the window has closed on the opportunity for an official statement, with 4 weeks until a presidential election. I think the marginal incremental disruption/inoculation impact of the statement would be hugely outweighed by the damage to the [Intelligence Community’s] reputation for independence.
I could be wrong (and frequently am) but Americans already “know” the Russians are monkeying around on behalf of one candidate. Our “confirming” it (1) adds little to the public mix, (2) begs difficult questions about both how we know that and what we are going to do about it, and (3) exposes us to serious accusations of launching our own “October surprise.” That last bit is utterly untrue, but a reality in our poisonous atmosphere.
Of course, when it comes to poisoning the atmosphere, the right-wing echo chamber has been drowning out liberal voices for years over matters large and small. Consider, for example, the Florida recount which decided—or more accurately, didn’t decide—the 2000 election between Al Gore and George W. Bush.
In the immediate hours after George W. Bush tallied a 537-vote margin out of 6 million cast in the Sunshine State, the Gore campaign sought hand recounts of ballots in four counties: Palm Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade, and Volusia. But the recount of the 654,000 ballots in Miami-Dade came to a halt after a “protest” intimidated the election supervisors there:
Republican telephone banks had urged Republican voters in Miami to go to the Stephen P. Clark Government Center downtown to protest the recount, which began there on Monday and which Democrats hoped would help swing Florida's 25 electoral votes to Vice President Al Gore.
The city's most influential Spanish-language radio station, Radio Mambi, called on staunchly Republican Cuban-Americans to head downtown to demonstrate. Republican volunteers shouted into megaphones urging protest. A lawyer for the Republican Party helped stir ethnic passions by contending that the recount was biased against Hispanic voters.
The subsequent demonstrations turned violent on Wednesday after the canvassers had decided to close the recount to the public. Joe Geller, chairman of the Miami-Dade Democratic Party, was escorted to safety by the police after a crowd chased him down and accused him of stealing a ballot. Upstairs in the Clark center, several people were trampled, punched or kicked when protesters tried to rush the doors outside the office of the Miami-Dade supervisor of elections.
And just who were those “grassroots” Republican protesters who “tried to rush the doors?” Led by longtime Republican dirty trickster Roger Stone (yes, that Roger Stone), the “Brooks Brother Riot” consisted mostly of GOP congressional aides from Washington, D.C.
As Rachel Maddow documented in August 2009, many of those same Republican operatives would re-emerge as leaders of the astro-turfed campaign to halt Obamacare in its tracks. That summer, FreedomWorks and other Koch-funded Tea Party groups deployed en masse to drown out Democratic town hall meetings and spread misinformation about what would become the Affordable Care Act. While the rallies and protests did not stop Obamacare from passing in March 2010, the GOP talking points about mythical “death panels” and a supposed “government take-over of health care” became cemented in the public. Despite being named the 2009 and 2010 Lies of the Year by Politifact, the Republican propaganda paid dividends in the 2010 midterms and beyond.
In September 2013, NBC Meet the Press host Chuck Todd revealed just how successful. When former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell lamented that Americans were misinformed about Obamacare, Todd protested:
"But more importantly, it's stuff that Republicans successfully messaged against it and they wouldn't have heard … they don't repeat other stuff because they haven't even heard the Democratic message. What I always love is people say 'it's your fault in the media.' No, it's the President of the United States' fault for not selling it."
That same day, Todd took to Twitter to repeat his point:
Somebody decided to troll w/mislding headline: point I actually made was folks shouldn't expect media to do job WH has FAILED to do re: ACA
But after eight hours of absorbing a pounding online, he returned to Twitter to clarify his clarification:
I was NOT saying it isn't job of journos to call out lies, I said it was not job of media to sell WH's health care message, it is WH's job.
Four years later, Chuck Todd appeared to have a change of heart. Hosting Trump lackey Kellyanne Conway, Todd proclaimed, “Alternative facts are not facts. They are falsehoods.” But by January 22, 2017, the damage was already done: Donald Trump was the 45th president of the United States.
When it comes to damage done to the United States of America, few chapters of our history are as dark as the years-long Bush administration regime of detainee torture. Donald Trump’s candidacy, I warned two years ago, revealed that “torture unpunished means torture repeated.”
Barack Obama’s failure to prosecute the architects and perpetrators of what his administration admitted were violations of U.S. and international law was both perfectly understandable and totally shameful. It is one thing to admit that, as Obama did, “we tortured some folks.” But that admission is not enough: the United States, like other signatories of the Conventions Against Torture, is treaty-bound to prosecute those responsible. But in early 2009, as I’ve detailed previously, Obama faced an American economy teetering on the edge of total collapse:
From a political and economic perspective, Obama's fear of looking into that rearview mirror was understandable. After all, the economy he inherited from President Bush was in free fall. In the last quarter of 2008, GDP collapsed by 8.9 percent; 2.2 million jobs evaporated in the first quarter of 2009 alone. With the economy requiring immediate action and his ambitious agenda for 2009, President Obama was afraid to risk a total political conflagration in Washington by launching the kind of investigation the Bush administration's possible war crimes demanded.
So, Obama signaled to Team Bush and its Republicans allies there would be no accountability for their high crimes and misdemeanors. And he did so by reducing war crimes to a talking point conservatives love most: "criminalizing politics.” As his attorney general nominee Eric Holder sadly put it in January 2009:
“I think President-elect Obama has said it well. We don't want to criminalize policy differences that might exist between the outgoing administration and the administration that is about to take over. We certainly don't want to do that.”
But when Obama released the infamous Office of Legal Counsel “torture memos” in April 2009 by proclaiming “at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past,” Republicans and their amen corner were promising retribution if the new president did anything more. If Republican war criminals were prosecuted, conservatives warned, Republicans would launch a scorched-earth response to metaphorically burn Washington to the ground.
Powerline's John Hinderaker made that threat in a piece titled "Criminalizing Conservatism." "Many liberals don't just want to defeat conservatives at the polls, they want to send them to jail," he wrote, adding, "Toward that end, they have sometimes tried to criminalize what are essentially policy differences." In a scathing editorial on April 23, 2009, titled "Presidential Poison," the Wall Street Journal went on the attack, using the GOP's tried and untrue criminalizing politics canard:
Mark down the date. Tuesday, April 21, 2009, is the moment that any chance of a new era of bipartisan respect in Washington ended. By inviting the prosecution of Bush officials for their antiterror legal advice, President Obama has injected a poison into our politics that he and the country will live to regret...
Above all, the exercise will only embitter Republicans, including the moderates and national-security hawks Mr. Obama may need in the next four years. As patriotic officials who acted in good faith are indicted, smeared, impeached from judgeships or stripped of their academic tenure, the partisan anger and backlash will grow...
Mr. Obama is more popular than his policies, due in part to his personal charm and his seeming goodwill. By indulging his party's desire to criminalize policy advice, he has unleashed furies that will haunt his Presidency.
But nine years later, no "patriotic official" has been indicted, no judges have been impeached, and no professor has been stripped of his academic tenure—not even the one who defined torture as "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” John Yoo was awarded an endowed faculty chair at the UC Berkeley School of Law. Bush appointee Jay Bybee remains on the federal bench. Cheney's legal alchemist David Addington is now creating alternative realities at the Heritage Center. Psychologist James Mitchell, one of the consultants who helped the Bush administration render the Geneva Conventions quaint, didn't lose his professional credentials, even after claiming, "I'm just a guy who got asked to do something for his country." Jose Rodriguez, who as head of the CIA's clandestine service personally ordered the destruction of dozens of interrogation videotapes, is a conservative hero who has smeared Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA torture program before having ever read a word of it.
Now, it’s no mystery why right-wing rage dominates the discourse, limits debate, alters what is reported (and how) and constricts policy options. The extensive, tightly integrated and highly disciplined network of conservative think-tanks, right-wing media, well-funded activist groups, and lockstep elected officials at the local, state, and federal level simply has no equivalent liberal counterpart. The GOP’s new “Iron Triangle” of self-selecting conservative media, unlimited campaign cash, and vote suppression means Republicans are largely unencumbered by either the truth or political precedent. Making matters worse, when politics is just another form of entertainment, right-wing passion plays about good versus evil make for the most compelling theater. It’s why right-wing hissy fits work. All told, these advantages explain by why Republican ranting and raving make press, politicians, and even presidents self-editing.
And that veto power of right-wing wrath must end. Now. No more refusing “to look backwards.” As distasteful as it is, Democrats must be willing to adopt any GOP tactic, bury any governing norm shattered by the Republicans, and prosecute any lawlessness, no matter how big the law-breaker. If the battles can’t be won in the Oval Office, in the Capitol, or in the courts, then public pressure in the streets will have to level the playing field. (Most Americans probably can’t remember a general strike in their lifetimes.) To borrow from the Party of Lincoln’s namesake:
“The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise -- with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”